Road rage, domestic violence, mass shooting—what makes a person snap? “It’s the continuing series of small tragedies that send a man to the madhouse…” Charles Bukowski wrote in his brutal ballad The Shoelace, “not the death of his love but a shoelace that snaps.”

Two framed quilts, Strings Attached and Wired To Snap, are placed back-to-back. Charles Bukowski’s poem “The Shoelace” is hand-embroidered on seventy-seven feet of ribbon, braided, wrapped and tied around the two quilts. The poetic wrapping evokes familiar feelings of comfort, tension, mystery, and healing.

Strings Attached (detail)